Thu 17th of June, filed under Social Media
Twitter has finally rolled out its new advertising platform: Promoted Tweets. The changes, first hinted at in November last year by Twitter COO Dick Costolo, will see company-promoted tweets prioritised in search results and trending topics.
The first promoted tweet has been paid for by Disney Pixar, advertising the launch of Toy Story 3 tomorrow. The topic appears in both the local and global trending topics list and is clearly labelled as ‘promoted’. When clicked on, the link takes Tweeters to the normal real-time feed of all related tweets on the topic with the original promoted tweet remaining permanently at the top of the page.
Organic tweets
With rumblings of dissent from sceptical tweeters echoing round the Twittersphere, the heads behind the social media site have been quick to point out that Promoted Tweets is not a standard paid advertising platform, stressing the organic process of promoted tweets and insisting that a promoted tweet or topic will not be displayed on the home page unless it is already naturally trending.
“Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single “ad” in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter,” explains the Twitter Help Center.
”This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment.”
Resonance
Twitter is using a new algorithm, Resonance, to monitor the reception of promoted tweets. Though they are keeping the exact details quiet, the site has revealed that Resonance is a metric which measures the popularity of a promoted tweet through assessing how much it is retweeted, favourited or replied to. If a promoted tweet is not meeting Resonance requirements then it will be removed.
Currently, Twitter is only working with a select group of advertisers, naming Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America as just a few of their advertising partners. It has assured interested parties that, once the process is more firmly grounded, they will be opening up the platform.
Meanwhile at Twitter HQ, the recent problems with the service seem to be settling down. In a blog post entitled ‘What’s happening with Twitter?’, the official blog has stated that the problems were caused by unexpected engineering faults and large amounts of traffic caused by the World Cup. The post also assures users that they are working hard to fix the faults.
”Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site,” the blog explains.
”During this time, the service will likely be taken down. We will not perform this work during World Cup games, and we will provide advance notification.”
Posted by Carli Harris
